This invention relates generally to social networking systems and in particular to presenting images associated with actions or objects to a user providing content to a social networking system.
Social networking systems allow their users to efficiently communicate information with each other to encourage interactions between users. Social networking systems allow users to share content with each other, to create and maintain events for users to meet in person, to establish connections with other users, or to perform other interactions with each other. To encourage user interactions, social networking systems strive to streamline interactions between the user and the social networking system. For example, a social networking system provides its users with interfaces that seek to reduce the number of clicks to reach a page, to reduce the number of characters a user inputs to provide content to the social networking system, and to reduce clutter when presenting content to users. Simplifying user interactions with the social networking system increases the likelihood that users continue using a social networking system.
While social networking systems capture and store information describing actions taken by their users, different users may often describe similar actions differently. This may make it difficult for users to quickly ascertain the subject matter of information about another user provided by the social networking system. For example, users may provide information describing these real-world interactions as unstructured data, which may be provided in different formats by different users. This variation in formats makes it difficult for other users to efficiently discern the content of the unstructured data. For example, different users may use different words to describe an interaction, making it difficult to determine if different users are referring to the same action. Hence, presenting unstructured data to social networking systems may make it difficult for other social networking system users to identify information from the unstructured data.